Poetry
Strėlė danguje
Not translated into English
Henrikas Radauskas · 1950
Synopsis
La Flèche dans le ciel: short poems, written in large part in exile, whose titles tell their subject matter: the birth of a song, spring, the return, Homer's youth, a woman before her mirror, the flower and the wind, a sailor's departure, the full moon, snow, the sleepwalker. Nature is grasped there as a raw fact, which mythology and art transform; an almost Dionysian joy of life sits alongside black humour and the melancholy of separation.
Context
The collection appeared in 1950 in Chicago, from Saulius, fifteen years after Fontanas, the author's first book, who had left Lithuania in 1944. The VLE notes the aestheticism of this poetry, its distance and its irony mingled with the tragic, nourished by mythology and world culture. Rimvydas Šilbajoris regards its author as a very original poet, foreign to all the currents of Lithuanian poetry of his century, and stresses the precise work of his metre.
Who it is for
Short poems, steeped in mythology, with no direct confession; no French translation of the collection has been found, and a selection of his poems exists in English.
Prizes and reception
The first book published in emigration by the man whom critics place among the most singular voices of Lithuanian letters.
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